Oscars 2026: Revolution, Grief and a Long Overdue Crown

The 98th Academy Awards gave us two of the year’s most urgent films battling it out for cinema’s highest honour — and, in the end, handed the trophy to a director the Academy had kept waiting for nearly three decades.

There is a particular pleasure in watching a room full of industry professionals try to appear nonchalant while the outcome of something they very much care about hangs in the air. The Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, on the night of 15 March, was full of exactly that energy. For months, awards watchers had been debating the same question with mounting obsession: would it be One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson’s sprawling, politically electric action-drama, or Sinners, Ryan Coogler’s vampire epic rooted in the cultural memory of Black America? By the time the evening closed with Anderson joking — Oscar finally in hand — that he’d quite like a martini, the answer was clear. But the journey there was anything but.

The Duel That Defined a Season

The 2026 awards season will be remembered, above all, as a contest between two very different visions of what American cinema can be. One Battle After Another, adapted from Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland and set amid an anarchist group liberating migrants from what the film depicts as an ICE-like encampment, wore its politics unapologetically on its sleeve. The film opens on Leonardo DiCaprio and Teyana Taylor’s anarchist group raiding a military-controlled facility and freeing its prisoners. Deadline Sinners, meanwhile, drew on the blues traditions of the American South and the horror of a community under siege from vampires — a metaphor rich enough to sustain any number of readings.

That two such films — both Warner Bros. releases, both commercially successful, both unafraid of difficulty — should dominate an awards season is, in itself, worth pausing over. Both films skipped the festival circuit, went directly to movie theatres, and proved to be darlings of critics and audiences alike. The Ringer In an era when the streaming platforms have largely decoupled prestige cinema from the communal experience of watching in a darkened room, there was something quietly significant about that.

Anderson ultimately prevailed. One Battle After Another won a leading six awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Supporting Actor for Sean Penn, Best Film Editing, and the inaugural Best Casting award. Wikipedia For Anderson — nominated more than a dozen times across his career, for films including Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood and Phantom Thread — it was a coronation long in the making. In his acceptance speech, he acknowledged the capriciousness of such prizes, citing the five 1975 nominees — all now considered classics — and noting that “there is no best among them. There is just what the mood might be that day.” Al Jazeera

Britain’s Night

If the Best Picture race was America’s story, the supporting cast of winners told a more international one — and nowhere more so than in the British-produced Hamnet. Chloé Zhao’s adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s Booker-shortlisted novel, produced by Sam Mendes and Steven Spielberg, had already been named Outstanding British Film at the BAFTAs in February. On Sunday night, it delivered the ceremony’s most emotionally unbridled moment. Jessie Buckley became the first Irish woman in Oscars history to win Best Actress The Hollywood Reporter, accepting the prize for her portrayal of Agnes Shakespeare — William’s wife, grief-struck and barely containable — with a speech that ended in Gaelic.

Buckley noted that Sunday was Mother’s Day in the UK, and dedicated her award to “the beautiful chaos of a mother’s heart.” Yahoo! It was a reminder, if one were needed, that the most universal stories are often the most particular — a woman’s grief, expressed in an ancient language, heard in a room full of Hollywood’s most powerful people.

For British cinema — and British literary culture — the evening was a considerable statement. Hamnet began its life as a London-based production acquisition, with producer Liza Marshall of Hera Pictures having secured the rights before O’Farrell’s novel was even published. The chain from a London literary agent’s desk to an Oscar podium is rarely straight, but here it was, rendered in gold.

For Turkish and Turkish-British audiences watching at home — whether in Hackney, Haringey or Istanbul — the question of which stories get told, and by whom, is never merely academic. British cinema’s increasing confidence in backing work that sits outside the mainstream Hollywood template, whether Shakespearean grief or politically charged thrillers, is something the Turkish-British creative community has long observed with a mixture of admiration and aspiration. The UK remains a place where the literary tradition and the cinematic one still speak to each other — and where a woman’s name, Agnes, can carry an entire awards season on its back.<br>

History Made, and History Noted

The ceremony was not without its quieter records. Sinners cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw became the first woman, and Black person, to win Best Cinematography Deadline, besting veteran cinematographers including Darius Khondji and Dan Laustsen. The A.V. Club Her speech — calling for all the women in the room to stand together — was one of the genuine emotional peaks of a long evening.

Sean Penn, who won Best Supporting Actor for One Battle After Another, became the fourth male actor and eighth overall to earn three acting Oscars Wikipedia — though he was notably absent from the ceremony, having already departed for Kyiv to meet with Ukrainian President Zelensky. Ukrainian Railways posted a video of Penn getting off a train in the capital, cigarette in hand, with the caption: “Sean Penn chose Ukraine instead of Oscar.” Yahoo! The gesture was either profound or performative, depending on one’s temperament, but it cut through the self-congratulatory fog of awards night in a way that very little else managed.

The introduction of Best Casting as an official category was, in its own way, as significant as any acting prize. The first casting Emmys had existed for ages — it was very much overdue recognition NPR for a profession whose practitioners have shaped every film we have ever loved, and whose names we rarely remember. Cassandra Kulukundis, winning for One Battle After Another, used her speech to remind the room of exactly that.

The Mood That Day

Paul Thomas Anderson’s allusion to the 1975 nominees — the idea that there is no objective best, only a prevailing mood — was more revealing than he perhaps intended. The films that win Oscars tell us something about where a culture is, and what it needs to believe about itself in the moment of choosing. In 2026, with American politics in a state of open convulsion and the relationship between art and power more fraught than it has been in decades, the Academy chose a film about resistance, about the people left behind by institutions, about a man who had spent his career making films about American obsession and excess and had finally, on his twelfth attempt, persuaded the room.

Whether One Battle After Another is Anderson’s best film — a question that will be argued in film-school seminars and late-night bars for years — is almost beside the point. What the Oscars confirmed is that it is the film this particular moment needed: messy, political, formally ambitious, and unwilling to offer comfortable resolutions. In a ceremony that, as one critic noted, was tasteful and safe in its staging, the films themselves were anything but. That is, perhaps, the most encouraging thing one can say about the state of cinema in 2026.